Language, Myth, and History in the Later Plays of Brian Friel

Abstract

Today Irish writers in literature, philosophy, and history, as well as other discourses, are in the process of rewriting Ireland. As George Steiner says, every generation uses language to build its own resonant past. ... Without the true fiction of history, without the unbroken animation of a chosen past, we become flat shadows (30). As part of this rewriting in Northern Ireland, the playwright Brian Friel and the actor Stephen Rae formed the Field Day Theatre Group in 1980. Since its founding it has broadened its scope beyond theater by bringing other prominent northern writers into its directorship, including Seamus Heaney, Seamus Deane, and Tom Paulin. Distinctly reminiscent of the founding of the Irish National Theatre in 1902 by Yeats, Lady Gregory, and the Fay brothers, Field Day is organized around an ambitious, politically motivated cultural program that has the potential to achieve for Northern Ireland what Yeats and his colleagues in the Irish literary revival accomplished at the beginning of the century for the South.'

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